Problems with Netscape 6?

Wednesday April 5th, 2000

We felt one of the items in the previous article's talkback forum was important enough to mention here. Asa Doltzer writes:

"Mozilla testers should continue to report bugs to Bugzilla. Netscape 6.0 PR1 testers should not report bugs to Bugzilla. Users of
Netscape 6 can at any time open the Help menu and choose Feedback Center to fill out a Feedback form. This form will be
submitted to Netscape rather than Mozilla. I repeat, please do not submit bugs you discover in the preview release of the
Netscape browser to Bugzilla, use Help -> Feedback Center. "

This is something very important to remember, as Netscape 6 bugs could be because of Netscape branding, and thus do not apply to Mozilla, or the bugs may have been already fixed in the current Mozilla nightlies.

I think there has been little if any mention of this anywhere on Mozilla or Netscape, and a major announcement and posting to the newsgroups is needed.
Has the code forked? If so, will it merge again at some point in the future to take advantage of fixes and new features in both versions?
These and other questions need clarification....
-Brian

i tried four times to use feedback center, twice in 6 and twice in 4.6 and each time got a server error. makes it hard to report problems.
my logitc scroll mouse doesn't scroll, and ms natural keyboard page up/down keys don't work. i find it slow and sluggish.. just thought i'd mention that.

yeah, i am having real trouple trying to get to the home.netscape.com, www.netcenter.com and www.netscape.com The site is realy slow and I keep getting the error - "Your client is not allowed access" or something like that. And that is in all my browsers.

i tried four times to use feedback center, twice in 6 and twice in 4.6 and each time got a server error. makes it hard to report problems.
my logitc scroll mouse doesn't scroll, and ms natural keyboard page up/down keys don't work. i find it slow and sluggish.. just thought i'd mention that.

That's just a cheap hack that uses the Windows native scrollbars rather then Mozilla's internal ones. It may be good for now, but eventualy that debug menu will be gone and you'll have to deal with the gfx scrollbars. According to the bugzilla report they have checked in some ne code that may help this problem, but we'll have to wait for M15 to see.

I guest that the distinction between the too identity are not enough made, it should be more said that Mozilla is a different project then Netscape. I think that we have here a little mystake. Netscape is using the Mozilla browser like any other company can(could) do it, even if the most of the developper are working for Netscape it should be clear, now I'm sure that they are more developper working on Netscape then on Mozilla (who are paid by Netscape). And don't put the same UI in both of them, it's to much easy for people to put them together, to link them.

I think you`re right - for me it was not (and even is not) really clear what the difference between Netscape and Mozilla is. I thought, that Netscape _is_ Mozilla. So maybe someone at Mozilla.org could write something about that ?

not to be offtopic, but I had always thought that the gray area in the skin was going to be filled in with something. It looks like the "undrawn" shade of gray that shows up a lot. Now it seems like it is actually supposed to be part of the skin, even though it is blank and ugly. The rest of the skin is fine, but is this space going to be filled or at least beveled in some way?

It's an intended effect, you'll see things like that in magazines and other design media. The problem is, at least in my opinion, that the colors for the skin were poorly selected which makes that grey area with the buttons overlapping into it stand out in a less than pleasing manner.

I was installing Netscape 6 on a Windows 95 system, the browser was installed, but when it went to install Net2Phone the installation program gave me a -255 error, anybody know what this is or how to finish the installation?

I must be drunk then. I could have sworn that it was posted somewhere on this site that someone integrated the code. I can see why they took it out of NS6 since it wasn't fully functional, but I'm surprised that the mozilla builds yanked it. Oh well, guess it doesn't matter as long as it ends up in the long run.

I believe that it was a bonehead idea for Netscape to branch B1 from the Mozilla tree instead of keeping the code base. Now they will probably diverge and the NS version will just become a buggy, regressive, and out of date compared to Mozilla. The same bugs will have to be fixed twice due to this code branching. Look at the website bar - in Mozilla its a nice variable width font, while in NS6 it is still this old Courier. Since Netscape developers are the backbone of Mozilla, they should redirect Mozilla efforts more towards (but not completely) to what Netscape needs. Not the Net2Phone crap and stuff like that, but the core Netscape stuff (like the website bar).

I don't know where you got that idea from, but there has been lots of efforts to get Moz's code base meet some of the goals where Moz and NS6 have in common. NS6 beta1 is just like another milestone build except with AOL/NS fluf. When NS releases beta2, it would have to get another branch from Moz. It would be real dumb to use NS6b1 as a code base for NS6 as many of the features that is still to come is in the Moz code base.

I might get worried about NS6b2 though. That's when the supposed feature freeze is suppost to happen.

XUL is being overhaul and improved as we post. It would be real dumb for them not to include it in later betas and final release. The reason it is still using the "old" fonts is that it takes time to pakage it (as this is the first beta).

Probably it doesn't recognize the browser type from it's user-agent string. This is sent in the http request to tell the server what client it is talking to. If you use NS6 through the Junkbuster proxy, you can set it to change the user agent string to something more palatable such as NS4.x.

I am currently using Windows 2000 and was able to install correctly. The problems comes when you try to execute it. It comes up with that quick splash screen ... then it quits. Is anyone having the same problem?

One thing that is lacking in the linux version that is really needed is the middle click on a link to open the link in a new window. This is a very important feature that everyone I know who uses linux must have. This feature speeds up looking at multiple pages exponentually. Please put it back in...also the highlight and click copy feature that is also a must have is having a couple of problems.

When I try to start NS6 (under Windows 98)with another skin most of the time NS6 freezes and I have to use ctrl/alt/delete to close the program. Only once have has NS6 started succesfully with a different skin. Is this a common problem?

It seems that the mozilla.org project has so far served the developer community and denied what the common users need in a modern BROWSER. What USER needs something that was supposed to be a browser but is now primarily called an OS by the people who created it? I would have served the USER first and then the DEVELOPER, but mozilla.org did it all backwards. Why?